Gresham College Lectures
Episodes
The Future of Health Globally
23 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This lecture looks at the very optimistic picture of trends in health around the world. Childhood deaths and the diseases of young adults are falling ...
Abstinence
20 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Abstinence from sex is a requirement for many people seeking a spiritual life. In the U.S., abstinence-only education has been officially endorsed sin...
Bernini and the Remaking of Rome
19 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Pope Alexander VII did more for Rome than any other Pope when in 1655 he employed the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini to reshape the city. Already celeb...
The Future of Life on Earth
19 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Although life is probably widespread in the universe, our pale blue dot, Earth, is the only known place harbouring intelligent life. Even if we manage...
Breaking Democracy: Lies, Deception and Disinformation
11 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With conspiracy theories and disinformation on the rise in both media and politics, is our democracy at risk? We may lose trust in society, in the ins...
Averting the Insect Apocalypse
11 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Recent studies from around the world show insects are disappearing fast. If this continues, this will have profound consequences for mankind and for o...
The Beginnings of Protestantism in Asia
11 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Early Protestant empires in Asia – in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Taiwan and elsewhere – brought missionaries with them. Like their Catholic pred...
Oxford’s Savilian Professors of Geometry: 400 Years On
06 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
England’s earliest chair of mathematics was that of Gresham College, founded in 1597, but who came next? The earliest University-based mathematics ...
What Can We Learn From Fakes?
06 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It seems that fakes are everywhere – very few domains of social life are exempt from concerns about fakes and a general ‘crisis of authenticity’...
Supply Chains in the Wellbeing Economy
04 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this lecture we are going to look at how the supply chains in a wellbeing economy bring together local production of food and stewardship of nature...
People and Purpose: Putting Positive Impact at The Heart of Economic Growth
04 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As we build on the economic recovery from COVID-19, we need to put our people and our purpose at the heart of financial and professional services to r...
Soviet Music in World War II
27 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The tribulations of WWII (the “Great Patriotic War”) prompted a temporary liberalisation within Soviet culture. Images of horror and grief, former...
The Surprising Uses of Conic Sections
27 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Conic sections – the curves made by slicing through cones at various angles – were studied by the ancient Greeks, but because of their useful prop...
The Global Financial Crisis and COVID... What Next?
25 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
‘Hyper-globalisation’ and the power of finance culminated in the global financial crisis of 2008 that was potentially as severe as the Great Depre...
Integral Transforms
21 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Integral transforms are the most rarefied of analyses – only used by a subset of engineers and computer scientists; laboured over by many an undergr...
Social Media, COVID & Ukraine: Fighting Disinformation
20 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Organised disinformation about the Covid-19 crisis has degraded public understanding of the crisis and threatened the reputation of credible vaccines ...
Humour and Music
19 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The scherzo (‘joke’) emerged in the vocal music of Monteverdi and became integrated into the string quartets and symphonies of Beethoven. Haydn an...
Freezing Eggs and Delaying Fertility: Law, Ethics and Society
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With the development of new vitrification techniques, egg freezing has become a viable option for women to protect and extend their fertility. Being a...
Taking on a Corporate Giant: David v Goliath Legal Cases
13 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Many people are inspired by stories of individual litigants, often with few financial resources and little assistance, taking on large corporations in...
Villains in the Novel: from Dickens, Hardy and Wilkie Collins to Hilary Mantel
11 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Are villains cardboard characters? If so, why do we enjoy them so much? Drawing examples from film and TV drama, as well as from popular fiction, thi...
Is Dementia Inevitable?
06 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What is dementia? Is it inevitable as we live longer that more of us will suffer dementia, or could we live longer lives without getting it? There ar...
Planetary Universe
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How can new worlds be discovered, and how many exo-planets might be out there? What does today’s technology in astronomical observatories now enable...
Going Viral: An Environmental Activist's Story
01 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Nathan Robinson’s video of him removing a plastic drinking straw from a sea turtle’s nose went viral in 2015. He has since been developing new ...
Aliens in Science Fiction
01 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Science fiction’s most frequent alternative to human is 'alien', another rich imaginative resource with which to think about what makes us...
Segregation and the Rule of Law
30 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The law has been used to entrench and uphold racial prejudice, most infamously in South Africa during the apartheid years, but also in the United Stat...
Monogamy
25 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Monogamy is a hotly contested practice. In many cis-gender marriages, engaging in sexual intercourse with a non-spouse is regarded as a serious betray...
Infections That Use Touch to Transmit
25 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Some diseases are spread almost exclusively by touch or through the skin or mucus membranes. These include Ebola, several parasitic diseases such as h...
The Neuroscience of Sleep and its Disorders
24 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A good night's sleep is anything but quiet: a myriad of processes occupy our brains, crucial for every aspect of our waking lives. Our increased ...
Does Philanthropy do the Public Good?
23 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Philanthropy has long played a key role in our communities on local, national, and global scales. Yet if we have often assumed that giving is good, we...
Psychosis: Our Default Mental State?
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Psychosis is a mental state where people experience a 'different' world. If, as clinical psychiatry and neuroscience suggests, it is our &ap...
The Beauty of Geometrical Curves
16 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The path traced out by a given point on the rim of a circle as you roll it along a straight line is a beautiful curve called a cycloid, whose appeal t...
Human Rights in the UK and the Commonwealth Caribbean
16 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law, was a landmark moment in British legal histor...
How Protestant Missionaries Encountered Slavery
15 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The entire Atlantic economy in the 17th and 18th centuries was based on the enslavement of (mostly) non-Christian Africans. As this lecture will show,...
Cellular Phones
14 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The most commonly used computer in the world is surely the one in your hand. Mobile or cellular telephony is nowadays hardly about telephony at all, b...
Coincidences in the Novel: Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot to Evelyn Waugh and David Nicholls
08 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If, as displeased reviewers and readers sometimes complain, coincidences mar good plots, why do so many novels turn on them? From Charlotte Brontë an...
Innovators and Entrepreneurs in a Wellbeing Economy
08 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What will the characteristics of successful innovators and entrepreneurs be in a wellbeing economy? In this lecture, we look at how the Wellbeing Eco...
Life in a Revolutionary Decade in Britain (1649-1660)
07 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What was life like in 1649-1660, Britain's only decade as a republic? This lecture explores the immense changes of the period through the person...
Coral Reefs in a Warming World
03 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Coral reefs are transforming under climate change. What is the nature of this change and the major influences upon it? The role of common management a...
How to Measure and Manage Risk
02 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Risk is one of the most powerful and dangerous concepts in finance – powerful because it allows individuals and companies to earn huge returns, but ...
Magnetic Universe
01 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Magnetic fields have mysterious effects that can be dramatically counterintuitive, and they are ubiquitous throughout the Universe and can have influe...
Robots in Science Fiction
28 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the late nineteenth century, highly contentious debates about prostitution were central to broader questions about women’s status within society,...
Sex Work
25 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the late nineteenth century, highly contentious debates about prostitution were central to broader questions about women’s status within society,...
The Evolution of Cancer Therapy
24 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Eleanor Stride will discuss the history and development of cancer therapy from its origins in Ancient Egypt - when surgery was the only opti...
Exploring the Deep Sea
23 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Deep Sea is Earth’s last great frontier. After almost 150 years of exploration and research we understand it is deep, dark and definitely differ...
Prokofiev The Soviet Artist
21 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This lecture will follow the tortuous path of Prokofiev’s transformation into a Soviet artist. Prokofiev had pursued his career abroad and returned ...
The Oil Shock and Neoliberalism
18 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 led to international disruption and a crisis in the post-war order. Domestically, weaker productivity growth, the sque...
Love and Music
17 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Tristan & Isolde, Romeo & Juliet, Pelléas & Mélisande are three pairs of lovers who have fired composers’ imaginations. Films like Lov...
The Maths of Proportion in Art, Design and Nature
15 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From the Ancient Greeks onwards, proportion and mathematics has been central to our ideas of form and beauty. This lecture looks at the famous golden...
The Brixton Riots: Policing the Community in the last 40 years
11 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Since the 1981 Brixton riots, many things have changed in British policing. However, Black people are still nine times more likely to be stopped and s...
Infections which use the Respiratory Route
10 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
COVID-19, pandemic influenza and tuberculosis are examples of the remarkable ability of infections to use the respiratory route of transmission. Infec...
Early Protestant Missions to the Americas
09 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Protestant settlers in the Americas believed it was their duty to convert indigenous peoples to the true Gospel. Yet the task proved unexpectedly diff...
Error Control Coding
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When was the last time you opened a file and noticed a computer glitch? “Never” is the usual answer. Yet the underlying hardware makes continual e...
The Broken Cosmic Distance Ladder
04 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Measuring distances to astronomical objects outside our Galaxy is a surprisingly hard challenge: it wasn't until 1923 that Edwin Hubble obtained ...
Brexit: What Have We Learned So Far?
03 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What has Brexit come to mean? This lecture will explain how the Brexit deal the UK and the EU ended up with came to be. It will then investigate the n...
Terror and the Rule of Law
02 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Revolutionary tribunals in 1790s Paris; the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s; and the prosecution of conspirators in the assassination attempt...
What is Happening to Christianity? Insights from Africa
01 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Christianity’s centre of gravity has shifted to the Global South. Prosperity churches, 'born again' politicians, prophets, healers and exo...
Structures in the Universe
28 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How did the cosmos transition into space characterised by galaxies in a plethora of different shapes of great beauty? This lecture will consider what ...
How To Make Financial Decisions
25 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Individuals and businesses make financial decisions all the time – whether to go to university, buy a house, build a factory, or train one’s workf...
Shostakovich on Trial: from Lady Macbeth to the Fifth Symphony
21 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This lecture focuses on one of the watershed moments of Soviet music history: the censure of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and the c...
Your Body Parts and the Law
20 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Do we own our own body parts? What can we do with them? Can we sell them and control what others do with them? People often say, "it’s my body&...
The Universal Value of Nature
17 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Does nature have a universal value? Can we consider natural capital as equivalent to financial capital? This lecture gives a brief history of value, e...
Sexually Transmitted and Intravenous Infections
14 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Some diseases are specialised in using sexual behaviour for transmission. Major pandemics including HIV and syphilis have been transmitted via this ro...
Pornography
07 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Pornography reflects as well as creates sexual norms and practices. The period from the 1960s to the mid-1980s has been called the 'Golden Age of...
Christmas Carols and Nostalgia
09 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This lecture takes a trip down Christmas's unique and emotionally complex memory lane via the Christmas Carol. Carols paint a colourful picture o...
Judicial Racism and the Lammy Review
02 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Judges, who are typically drawn from privileged backgrounds, wield vast power over the lives of the most marginalised people in society. This lecture ...
Attacks on Knowledge from Ashurbanipal to Trump
02 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This lecture explores the destruction of libraries, archives and other knowledge, from Babylonian times until now, and its implications for society to...
Early Protestant Missions to Jews, Muslims and Pagans: A Dangerous Model
01 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
European Protestant and evangelical Christians did not have to look far to find 'infidels' in the 16th and 17th centuries: as well as the &a...
Women in Science Fiction
29 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For thousands of years, some men assumed that the original or ideal human type was male, with women being pictured as weaker or imperfect men. This an...
Food- and Drink-Borne Diseases
24 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Many major diseases are transmitted by food or drink. Cholera (water), brucellosis (milk), BSE/nvCJD, typhoid and many parasites are ingested as part ...
Compression
23 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When you tune into Netflix you might not be aware that the box in your living room starts a complex set of negotiations with servers on moving 563 Gby...
Free Thinking and the Rule of Law
22 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The law has been used to impose religious and moral conformity and uniformity of thought at many times in history, perhaps most (in)famously in the tr...
The Maths of Beauty and Symmetry
22 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
People have always found symmetry aesthetically pleasing and examples of it are seen in the earliest art. The Platonic solids have been known to human...
How can music be "Socialist Realist"?
18 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This lecture will investigate the genesis of the Socialist Realism doctrine, which was imposed in 1934. The 'proletarian music' trend of the...
Holocaust History Under Siege in Poland
17 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For the second Annual Alfred Wiener Holocaust Memorial Lecture, Professor Jan Grabowski will discuss how scholars of the Holocaust find themselves con...
Nature's Numbers: Natural Capital Accounting
16 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How can nature be accounted for? How can we track how we are using nature and ensure we are not destroying the environment? Natural Capital is becomin...
Einstein's Blunder
15 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Albert Einstein tweaked his newly invented equations of General Relativity in 1917, he had one goal in mind: to find a solution that described a ...
Perversion
11 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What is a perversion? This talk starts by exploring psychiatric and sexological debates about perverted sexual desires from the late nineteenth centur...
Ancient Greek and Roman Libraries
10 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Although Mesopotamian civilisations had assembled texts, the ancient Greeks brought the idea of the universal book collection to its near-legendary co...
What is a Religion? : Rethinking Religion and Secularism
09 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Most of us would consider Islam to be a religion, while we would generally view secularism as requiring the limiting of religion to the private sphere...
The Great Depression and 'Embedded Liberalism'
09 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Great Depression posed a serious threat to democratic capitalism as economic nationalism flourished and Communism and Fascism offered alternative ...
Atomic Universe
03 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Subsequent to the Hot Big Bang, as the Universe expanded and cooled, atoms formed and, later still, decoupled from radiation. This lecture will cover ...
Portraits, Biographies and Public History
02 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Immense curiosity exists about the lives of people who lived in the past. Portraits and biographies play a major role in bringing the dead to life, bu...
Europe's Search for Security After World War One
01 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
After the ravages of the First World War there was a widespread desire for 'sustainable security'. Contemporaries were preoccupied with hung...
The Manuscripts and Intellectual Legacy of Timbuktu
28 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Malian city of Timbuktu is one of the world's oldest seats of learning and has an intellectual legacy of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts...
Plot
27 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Elaborate plotting is the novelistic skill least often valued by critics, even if relished by readers. This lecture will look at novelists who raise p...
How the Financial System Works
26 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This lecture will explore our financial system. Why do banks exist, and what do they do with the money that savers lend to them? We'll explore wh...
Children and Consent to Medical Treatment
25 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How does the law consider children in cases involving medical consent? This lecture will look at how doctors (and parents) should talk their children ...
The Death of Richard III: CSI Meets History
21 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The skeleton of King Richard III was discovered beneath a Leicester car park in 2012. Modern forensic techniques were used to analyse the injuries to ...
Histories of Numbers
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This event will focus upon mathematics as expressed in different languages and cultures.A lecture by Karine ChemlaThe transcript and downloadable vers...
Knot Just Numbers: Andean Khipu Strings
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This event will focus upon mathematics as expressed in different languages and cultures.A lecture by Manuel MedranoThe transcript and downloadable ver...
Histories of Numbers
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This event will focus upon mathematics as expressed in different languages and cultures. A lecture by Karine ChelmaThe transcript and downloadable ver...
Sanskrit Mathematics in the Language of Poetry
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Anuj Misra will discuss Sanskrit Mathematics in the Language of Poetry (4pm).A lecture by Dr Anuj MisraThe transcript and downloadable versions of ...
Shakespeare, Race and Performance
19 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How do Shakespeare's familiar plays Othello and Romeo and Juliet reflect the early modern preoccupation with race and emerging concepts of colour...
The Maths of Perspective in Art
18 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi, designer of the dome of Florence cathedral, is also known for developing the rules of linear perspective. ...
What does it mean for Israel to be a Jewish state?
14 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
What do we mean when we refer to the State of Israel as 'the Jewish State'? What does it mean for the politics of the state to be identified...
Insect Vector-Borne Diseases
13 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Many of the major diseases of humans are transmitted by insect vectors. Malaria, sleeping sickness, typhus, dengue, Zika and plague are examples where...
GPS
12 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1977 or thereabouts a collection of scientists huddled around a secret radio receiver in the US desert. This was the start of GPS, Glonass, Gallile...
Pleasure
07 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Sex manuals can incite revolution. In the early 1970s a feminist collective released Our Bodies, Ourselves (1970) while 'free love' proponen...
Blacks Britannica: Diversity in Medieval and Early Modern England
06 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Africans have been present in England for more than two thousand years, but we rarely see them or hear about them. And often their existence is dismis...
Redesigning the World in Which We Live to Put the Planet First
05 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How can we help human society flourish without destroying nature? The Wellbeing Economy and Natural Capital are linked strategies that can help achiev...